Scenarios are possible and plausible pictures of the future. They are created through a series of conversations, through which a group of people invent and consider several varied stories about how the world may turn out. Scenarios are powerful tools for challenging assumptions about the world, and in so doing, they lift the barriers of our own creativity and understanding about the future.

The real power of the scenario planning process is the ability to bring many different stakeholders into a conversation about the future, thereby creating collective ownership of these sets of pictures, and building important relationships across differences. By encouraging scenario planning processes at different levels of an organization or community, old paradigms are challenged, and innovation is encouraged through surprising possible stories of the future.